Honest Data Broker

Bespoke Project Data Management Application

The EU Lead Factory's Honest Data Broker (HDB) is a bespoke HTS triage and project management application developed to support the unique scientific and intellectual property (IP) requirements of the EU Lead Factory. It enables scientists to select the best compounds emerging from the HTS screens while ensuring that all activities remain within the IP framework agreed by the project partners. The HDB is hosted on Biovia's ScienceCloud and comprises a full suite of cheminformatic tools to enable filtering, clustering, similarity searches, activity modelling, multiparameter optimisation and is seamlessly linked to established visualisation tools on the same cloud platform.

In addition to these scientific tools, the HDB has a collection of management and auditing features to track the status of compounds, perform IP checks and apply the agreed rules of the EU Lead Factory triage process. Access to compound structures is stringently controlled and enabled only at key points in the workflow to supplement the information provided by the cheminformatic tools. This protects the IP of the compound owners but allows structure visibility at critical stages to support high quality decision-making by programme scientists.

The HDB also performs a key role in linking EU Lead Factory partners and coordinating their efforts. Library proposals from the Public Chemistry Consortium were tested for similarity against the existing Joint European Compound Library to ensure that chemical space is sampled efficiently and highly similar compounds were not put forward for synthesis. Elsewhere, an effective and fast ordering process for compounds to confirm biological activity, perform more detailed kinetic characterisations or check compound purity is critical for the progress of a programme. An interface in the HDB mediates all ordering and links programme scientists with the logistics team at BioAscent for rapid compound dispatch.

The HDB is continuously developed in response to user input. An active area of development is the extraction of knowledge from the growing body of structure-activity data to further increase the effectiveness of HTS triage.

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The European Lead Factory (ELF) secured a total project budget of EUR 36.5 million under the second framework of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI). 20 partners in 7 countries will push forward the transformation of potential drug targets to new medicines in the new project ESCulab (...

The European Lead Factory has successfully accelerated the process of drug discovery. A recently published public summary of results so far clearly shows the benefits of collaborative drug discovery in the European arena.

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The research leading to these results has received support from the Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking under grant agreement n' 115489, resources of which are composed of financial contribution from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7 / 2007-2013) and EFPIA companies' in kind contribution.

This project has also received funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 806948: ‘ESCulab: European Screening Centre; Unique Library for Attractive Biology’. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA and Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV).